How Adam Scott became an accidental horror movie star

Adam Scott grew up watching horror movies at, as he describes it, “probably too young” an age. But he never set out to work specifically in the genre. Even still, horror seemed to follow him around from the very beginning. His first major film role was in Hellraiser IV in 1996. “It wasn’t because I was a Hellraiser fan,” he says. “It was because it was the job I got.” Later, he took a starring role in Krampus not because it was horror, but because it evoked the kinds of ’80s movies he grew up with, like Poltergeist and E.T . It may not have been intentional, but he’s steadily built up a solid body of work in the genre, including leading the often terrifying sci-fi thriller Severance . Most recently, he served as the lead in Hokum , an Irish horror movie from Oddity director Damian McCarthy. Again, though, it wasn’t the genre that lured him to the project. “I was mostly attracted to it for the character and the story,” he tells me. “The fact that it was a horror movie was kind of secondary.” Hokum opens in theaters on May 1st, and Scott plays a novelist named Ohm who ventures to a quaint hotel in Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. It’s the kind of tucked-away place where goats climb on cars in the parking lot and the basement is almost definitely haunted. Ohm starts out as an asshole struggling with an emotionally difficult task, but as the film progresses and we learn more about both why he is that way and the history of the hotel, his story becomes much more complex. …